grape

I love grapes but I hate raisins. I have never understood why the act of drying would render grapes into something so different than and so much worse than their original form, but I assumed this great difference was what made people refer to them as different things from grapes. You dry apricots, you have dried apricots. You dry cranberries, you have dried cranberries. Dry some grapes, however, and you’ve got raisins — shriveled, gummy shouldn’t-bes that no one would call “dried grapes” because they’re so much more gross than that.

This is not exactly the case.

Raisin has meant “dried, sweet grape” in English since around the 1300s, and it comes from the Old French raisin, simply meaning “grape.” That word traces back to the Latin racemus, “cluster of grapes or berries,” which Etymonline supposes came from “a loan-word from the same ancient lost Mediterranean language that gave Greek rhax, “grape, berry.” Oddly, even though the entry leads with “dried, sweet grape,” it also notes that in Middle English, which was spoken from about 1150 to 1450, raisin could also just mean “grape.” But how did raisin come to mean only the dried version?

There was not a clear answer in the entry for grape. Sometime in the 1200s, grape became the English word for not only a singular grape berry (because grapes are berries, even if we don’t like to think of them as such) but also a collective singular. Grape comes from the Old French grape, also both collective and singular, which traces back to an unknown word either from Frankish or some other Germanic language that was a variation on the Proto-Germanic *krappon, meaning “hook” and related to a whole mess of words that mean “bent, crooked or hooked,” including English’s own cramp. The connection might be that a hook used for grape-picking might have ended up being associated with the fruit itself.

In case you’re wondering, grappa is, in fact, related to grapes; grappa is a brandy distilled from the residue of wine-making,” and grappa is just Italian for “grapes.” The connection to grapefruit is more mysterious. The name might stem from  this particular citrus’s tendency to grow in gape-like clusters, but the entry also notes that it was “said to have been so called for its taste,” which is strange because grapes are sweet and grapefruits are bitter. (That entry also note notes that grapefruit could also just be a marketing name, as it has previously been called pomelo and shaddock, though Wikipedia seems to disagree on that, saying that the pomelo and the shaddock are the same thing, and that the grapefruit resulted from the accidental crossing of that plant and the sweet orange — and also that the first grapefruit were originally called forbidden fruit, though also the forbidden fruit may have also been a similar, related fruit. It’s very confusing. In any case, pomelo now refers to a different fruit.)

Also, when grape became the word in English, it replaced winberige, “wine berry,” which is too bad because that’s a lovely name for it. But why did we end up with two different words for the regular and dried version of this fruit? The best answer I can find is that in French, dried grapes are raisins sec, and that an English-speaker hearing that name after being given a handful by a French person might walk away thinking “oh, these are called raisins,” and it spread in that fashion. I suppose this supports my original theory: that no one would immediately think that this disgusting shrivellies would be the same thing as grapes. Because obviously. 

For what it’s worth, I also could not find a definitive reason why certain white grapes, when dried, are called sultanas, a sultana being the wife, daughter or concubine of a sultan.